I just read a post about a Kadet Senior "Tail Dragger". It's a beautiful airplane and I am considering getting one for the same reason at the poster, to use as a relaxing Sunday Flyer. But I don't know if I want to convert it to a tail dragger. I know from experience that my tricycle gear airplanes handle MUCH better on the ground than my tail draggers. I also realize that the nose gear causes more drag on a trike, but that shouldn't really matter with a plane like the Kadet Sr. Other than trainers, it seems that most of the airplanes I see at the field are tail draggers. Why do most people prefer the conventional gear over the trikes?

Personally, I find the reduced weight makes the plane fly better.

Also, taildraggers handle rough ground much better, which is an issue when grass cutting is delayed.

Besides... there comes a time when you realize that "training wheels" just aren't that sexy.

I got to agree most really nice airplanes are taildraggers not all but most. Its not as bad as most would have you belive. Extra bonus you get to use the other stick for something besides fast and slow. Most guys never do. Give it a try you'll never go back. Mike

Yeah, taildraggers are just more fun.

Nice picture of a Sopwith Camel, right Jim?

taildraggers aren't THAT difficult, but trikes are really that EASY ground handling. i don't have a single trike flying right now. i think taildraggers are much more graceful.

Webeflyin',

The only trike I had was my Hobbico Superstar 40.
The trike set-up was good for landing gear replacement practice and mowing the high grass. It was also instructional in learning how to thread yet another pushrod around the tank and through the firewall. Trike gear also taught me how hard "hardened steel" is when trying to grind a flat spot for the control arm.
I eventually converted it to a taildragger.
Since then I've built and put together models strictly as taildraggers whether the destructions allowed for them or not.
Taildraggers have taught me just how much lighter that tailwheel is compared to the nosewheel of a trike.
My airplanes can "bow" to the crowd after an interesting flight and with a little down-elevator and full rudder they can turn practically on a dime. Taildraggers don't have that wonderful tendancy to tip forward left or right as trikes do. (If a taildragger nose-overs the gear is too far back or one needs more upelevator).
Why anyone would want a trike I'll never know.
I'll admit SOME airplanes do LOOK better with the trike set up. I wonder why there aren't more of them...
Ok, Ok. I'll stop.
Can you tell I'm a Taildragger fan?

Soon you too will be a taildragger fan.
Give it some time.

Jeff

I have been flying so many planes and I find there is no real difference in taking off or landing a tail dragger or trike. Its all the same. I don't even bother if the tail wheel is not aligned properly. What I care is to just look at the plane and keep it tracking straight. Its making the plane do what you want it to do and not worry that it has such a peculiar trait.

tIANci - will disagree with you on the observation "there is no real difference in taking off". taking off in crosswinds, the taildragger will want to weathervane and maybe groundloop while i've never seen that happen with a trike. also, on the ground during taxiing, you have the same problems.

basically the size of the wheel should let you know how much steering you get from the setups. nose wheels on our models tend to be about the same size as the mains and multiple times larger than the tail wheels. this is because they are much more load bearing. on a trike setup the mains and nose gear carry the load much more evenly than with a tail dragger. tail draggers load is mainly on the main gears. that's why they tend to nose over and while taxiing you should give full up elevator to increase steering effectiveness. to decrease the chances of nosing over and increase steering effectiveness, some people will bend their landing gear until they are well forward of the leading edge of the wing. yes... in that case, tail draggers are only slightly less difficult than trikes. but i think it looks silly.

fly a cub on a windy day where the winds are blowing across the runway and you'll know why trainers aren't taildraggers.

Taildraggers are more fun and gratifying to take off and land. They require a little more skill to do so. That's why all of my planes are taildraggers.

Rich,

NICE aircraft! Excellent!

Forestroke,

Trikes do weathervane. The reaction of the aircraft to the wind doesn't necessarily mean the tail is going to swing around as with a taildragger. From what I remember, more often than naught the aircraft will do as I mentioned earlier: "... tip forward left or right..."
Admittedly trikes do track better in a cross wind but they DO still weathervane in the conventional sense.


When it comes to making the choice between the two, people are going to build and fly what they are most comfortable with.
Personaly, I feel taildraggers are easier to control, require less work/maintanence, and simply look "right" to me. Watching the tail come up on a nice gradual takeoff run is a beautiful thing. The same thing applies to landings - landing on the mains and watching the tail drop.


I say, "Build what you want!"

Here are two that were supposed to be trikes but never saw a nosewheel.

Tail draggers rule! I had a main wheel hit a gopher hole on my Sea Fury during a takeoff. The plane bounced a bit on that side and just on going until it took off a few seconds later. If that had been the nose wheel of a trike gear , the results would have been a tipped plane and probably a damaged firewall.

I can only relate my peronsal experience. I wanted to try a tail dragger a few years ago, but was a bit apprehensive because everyone talked about how they were harder and you had to worry about ground loops and nose overs and other stuff. So I bought a battered up old super sportster arf off ebay to practice on. I was surprised that all I had to do was gun the throttle, steer a tiny bit, and take offs were a complet non-event ... I thought it tracked a lot straighter than my old sweet stik trike ... although that had the gear bent everywhich way on it over the years so nothing was straight anymore.

Since then I've flown an UltraSport 40, a tiger bipe, and the Kadet Senior you mention ... all tail draggers. For something with long moments and the main gear pretty far forward, ground handling has been completely reasonable ... you just steer like you would any plane on take off and you zip down the runway and take off. Likewise landings have been no problem either. I've been able to *induce* a ground loop on the super sportster, but I actually had to work pretty hard to make that happen.

I have seen some R/C tail draggers that are a real handful, so the people that talk about problems and issues are also correct ... a small pits with about 2x too much power, a decathelon, and a cub ... all were nearly impossible to get airborn ... but the Kadet Senior is no problem, I would happily recommend it tin a tail dragger configuration to someone who is comforatable flying tricycle gear airplanes.

You asked about preference ... I just thought the wire tricycle gear that comes stock with the Kadet looked really spindly and ugly... I imagined it vibrating over the bumps and generally looking really obnoxious. As soon as that picture entired my head, I knew I would have to convert mine to a taildragger with more solid aluminum main gear. I think the Kadet looks ****much**** better as a tail dragger. This isn't a scale airplane, but it looks (and can be made to fly) very scale like.

I would also point out that I chose a 4 stroke engine (ASP/Magnum 61). This led me down a cascading chain of events where I ended up with the engine mounted inverted (as the only way I could get the throttle in a place where I could run the linkage to it without drilling holes through my tank.) But this put the cylinder head and carb right where the nose wheel mount was supposed to go ... so in the end I would have had to convert to a tail dragger anyway.

If you get to the point of actually going forward with this project, let me know and I can go measure the gear dimensions I chose and you can adjust to your own taste from there.

And your point about a relaxing flyer is absolutely correct. The Kadet is such an immense pleasure to fly, I still have traces of a smile left over from my flying session yesterday. One thing that has been really fun with this airplane is slips. The Kadet floats so much on landing approach that I've been starting to use a slip on the down wind and base and even final approach legs of my pattern to bleed off extra altitude. I'm a mediocre pilot, but I'm starting to get the hang of doing slips in the Kadet and I can do them now with out going all wobbly.

I don't think the question should be tricycle vs. tail dragger, but instead should be how exactly is the best way to rig up a steerable tail wheel? My choice of putting a little servo in the tail works great, but I ended up with 10.5 oz of lead added to the nose to get it balance ... :-( On the other hand, with the Kadet Senior, an extra pound of weight is about as unnoticable as an extra pound on Kirs------ you know I was going to pick on Kirstie Alley here ... but that would probably be in bad taste so maybe I'll leave the sentence incomplete. :-)

Regards,

Curt.

If you fly off grass, sooner or later you are going to gravitate toward taildraggers. Most groundloop and other handling problems associated with taildraggers occur on paved runways. On grass, taildraggers are much more forgiving.

To me, trikes have to be landed at very close to a perfect 3-point attitude. The nosegears constantly get bent. Besides, the larger the airplane model, the less trikes you have to pick from. If you are at all thinking of going larger, you might as well start getting used to taildraggers.

I've always thought of nose gears as 'devices that are placed on planes to remove the firewall' I'll take a taildragger over 'training wheels' anyday.

Jerry

Like I said earlier ... tail draggers are not hard to fly at all. I think 90% of my planes are tail draggers and I never had ground loop problems.

Thanks for all the comments. I do have a couple of tail draggers (a Twist and an Ultra Stick). After I bent in a little toe in, they became more managable. We don't have any grass fields out here in NM, in fact, we don't have much grass anywhere at all! ) Our runways are paved and I am an expert at ground looping! Having said that, I still think I will go the tail dragger route on my Kadet Senior. I have a Saito 82a (currently on my Twist) and an OS .61FX. I think I'll put the OS on the Twist and use the Saito on the Kadet!

For what it's worth, I have an ASP (Magnum) 61 four stroke on my Kadet Senior. I can take off in just a few feet and climb out at a very steep angle (although I can't go vertical.) I can putter around all day at just a few notches above idle. Take offs at 1/2 throttle with this engine are very scale like ... smooth acceleration, tail comes up, then after a few more feet the plane lifts off and you can climb out at a nice angle. The Kadet is reasonably strong, but is made out of very light construction. I don't think it's designed to be severely overpowered. But half the fun of this hobby is testing out our crazy ideas. :-)

Curt.

Either engine will have more than enough power, but I would put the .61FX on the Kadet Sr. You will have an easier time balancing the plane with the heavier 2stroke engine. I have a Saito 82 as well and it is a lightweight power house. It is precisely designed to overpower .40 ships like your Twist.

That's a fair point ... I needed my ASP 61 four stroke + 10.5 oz of lead up front to balance out my Kadet Senior ... part of that may have been due to the tail wheel servo (and tail wheel assembly) I installed in the tail. I went with a micro servo hoping that it wouldn't affect balance too much, but I suppose if these have a tendency to come out tail heavy anyway, any thing extra back there will need to be compensated for in 3x the weight in lead up front.

On the other hand, I still stand by my statement that you don't want to over power/over speed the Kadet too much. The airframe starts to "sing" at about 30-35 mph. You can really hear it in a steep dive if you cut the throttle. Level flight you are probably going to be fine, but if you have a big engine I'd suggest that you avoid full power dives and high "G" pull outs.

Regards,

Curt.

I had read/heard a great deal about how difficult tail draggers were in comparison to trikes, so I had a bit or reservation when I built my second taildragger some 20 years ago. (The first was a Butterfly with a take off run of about 3') The second was a Lazy Ace which represented a much more substantial expenditure of time and effort. Suffice it to say, I still have the Lazy Ace, and have never built another tricycle gear model. In my opinion,and just like certain body parts, we all have at least one, Tail draggers are muck more graceful to watch on takeoff and landing.

BTW: way back when, I started flying lessons in a Cessna 172, but my first solo was in a J-3 Cub. I found it easier to manage than the trike geared Cessna. Of course it was much lighter

Bottom line; fly what you like. If the model is otherwise within your ability don't be intimidated by the landing gear.

Good Luck!

jess

I love my taildraggers!I too heard horror stories about how difficult taildraggers were.. Then I built my Ultra Stick Lite for my first taildragger.. Way easier to control on the ground, plus if you have a large rudder and letyour tailwheel freewheel around then with just a blast of air it turns on a dime! plus when you fly you notice a huge difference because your able to control your rudder better and thus become a better pilot

Trikes taxi and handle better on the ground in the wind. I live in Colorado Springs where the wind never seems to stop, so I bought an ultra stick 60, converted it to trike gear and slapped an EVO 100 on it. I am having more fun with this plane than with my EF 50cc Yak right now, but only because of all the darned wind!

Jess's bottom line comment above (post #20) is dead on. The difference is not THAT big a deal. I prefer taildraggers too and have long felt that, on grass especially, they are less troublesome than nosewheels.

Tho at least part of this is due to the fact that many models have nosewheels that are poorly designed and poorly made. Model designers do not seem to have wigged on to the reason why, for example, bicycles and motorcycles have their steering axis angled forward and not just straight up and down. So do tri-geared full size Cessnas and others. It's done that way so the line of the steering axis intersects the ground at a point ahead of the point where the wheel contacts the ground. With the rolling drag acting thru a point behind that intersection point, the wheel tends to remain straight and not just wander off in every direction. If a bicycle had its steering axis straight up and down, you would have a heck of a time riding "no hands".

Besides the design, the model nosewheel struts usually have several coils wound in, supposedly for "spring action". Tell me, how is the strut supposed to flex and spring back when the coils are wound so tight that they rub against each other? At least if the coils were wound with a small space between them, it would have a fighting chance. As it is, they just bend and take a set, usually at a point just above the coils. I suspect the temper of the wire on many of them may not be quite right either. Many (not all) main gear struts are afflicted with too-tight-coils too.

I have been complaining about this for 35 years or so but, alas, have been but a voice crying in the wilderness... (Ok, admittedly, I have not written any manufacturers about it, but you must realize that this comes in Vol. XIX, Chapter 28, Sec. E, Verse 36 of "Tom's Pet Peeves". If I wrote this complaint, I'd have to write all the others too. I haven't got time to write that many letters. It's more fun to get on RCU and squawk.)

In full size, after having been brought up on milk stools, taking some dual in a tail dragger for the first time was a rude awakening. I had read many articles, both for models and full size, about the "tail dragger challenge" for nosewheel pilots. Strangely, not one of them ever explained what the actual problem is. But my instructor explained it well. On the tricycle, the mains are BEHIND the center of gravity. Any side forces are automatically counteracted by the mains that want to stay nicely in trail. On the taildragger the mains are AHEAD of the CG. Any slight deviation from rolling straight ahead tends to worsen. Of course! The light bulb went off. It occurred to me that this situation is much like a big truck; a tail dragger rolling forward is like a tractor-trailer backing up - the slightest deviation from dead straight tends to increase. The tricycle gear acts more like the tractor-trailer going forward.

These tendencies are more pronounced on a hard surface than on grass which tends to help the tailwheel resist side forces a bit better.

On the full size the tailwheel steering had springs (the full size really needs them) but that gave me a problem with the timing. The nose would start to swing, I'd stomp on a pedal, and nothing would happen right away. Getting worried, I'd stomp a little harder but just about then was when it was going to respond anyway and now I had too much and the nose would suddenly swing the other way. The cycle would repeat till the instructor grabbed it before I took out a runway light. Takeoffs were giving me more trouble than landings. But the landings were not trouble free either. Landing a tricycle, after all 3 wheels are on, you get in the habit of mentally relaxing ("Ah, I made it!") You are lulled into a false sense of security. On a taildragger, it WAS well behaved up to now but that's just the point where the adventure begins. As the airplane slows and airflow over the rudder is reduced, its stabilizing force vanishes and just where you start letting down your guard it suddenly starts getting squirrelly, trying to go every which way but straight. This is the reason for the old saying that you are not finished landing a taildragger until the hangar door is locked.

If I'd had the opportunity to continue flying the Citabria, I would have eventually developed the "feel" and the timing and would surely have "conquered" it, but things didn't work out that way.

These days I have no such problems with models and really enjoy the taildraggers. I have even simplified things in this way: on several of mine I did away entirely with tailwheel steering and just let it caster freely, steering with the prop blast over the rudder. This saved transmitting a lot of impact loads and vibration to the servo and the rudder hinges. It worked out fine - on grass, anyway. Granted, the steering was slightly less positive but only slightly - sometimes the tailwheel is on one side and I have to goose it some and hold opposite rudder to get the wheel to swing over but this is really not a big deal. How much precision do you really need in your ground handling anyway? I don't need to navigate a slalom course at my field so it's well worth it to save a beating on my servos and hinges and some building time and really, I give up very little in ground handling. It just feels a little different.

I wonder if we are doing newcomers such a big favor by adhering to the Modeling Law that says trainers MUST have nosewheels. Ever watch the circus when someone has his nosewheel steering too sensitive? People set Olympic records shinnying up flagpoles and trees and diving behind cars...

Tom

Try a roll out with a smith miniplane or another short coupled tail dragger aircraft like th e pitts and say it's no big deal. I'm afraid you might eat crow! Even on grass they will ground loop like nobodys business.

Of course those aircraft are the exception, not the norm. But as Richard L. says, it is just much more gratifying to use a tail dragger- it uses a little more skill.

Funny thing. When I started flying RC about 30 years ago, practically all sport planes were trikes. Mention "tail dragger" to most sport pilots and they would freak out! How times have changed!

Bill